Weeknotes 154

You know when something is obviously going to be a problem, but the person you’re talking to insists it will be fine? It was not fine.

The replacement chair was due to dispatch at the “end of May”. I was told I would be notified of dispatch. Reader, they did not notify me. They tried to deliver it whilst I was away instead.

And then sent me a passive aggressive email about me not being available to take delivery.

So after all the drama of my car breaking I drove for 5 hours on Sunday and didn’t lose any coolant at all. I then took it to the garage the next day, where the mechanic couldn’t find any leaks whatsoever.

It seems that any leak that was present has been fixed by me adding some Radweld to the coolant system a few weeks previous. The inexplicable thing is why the previous garage thought there was a leak from the radiator. Hopefully it stays fixed.

However, my partner’s car didn’t make the journey unscathed and developed it’s own set of problems. They too, then mysteriously disappeared. Cars, man.

I forgot to say last week that the trespassing gardener returned, and this time with a ladder!

It’ll come as no surprise to you that I agree with this.

Life before rubocop:

Once in a while you’d come across some unusual formatting and it was possibly a small annoyance.

Life after rubocop:

Constant stream of “fix rubocop” commits, everyone finding their own bespoke workflow trying to automate rubocopping, CI failing valid ruby because of its format, magic comments sprinkled across code, new versions of rubocop continuing to change code that has no problems into a form that a few people (who call themselves the community) thought was better

This is the bit that annoys me most.

who call themselves the community

You can change Rubocop rules, of course, but the problem is that a lot of people have decided they are “best practice” as they’ve been decided by the “community” – they haven’t. So many of the decisions are very un-rubyish at best, and actively harmful at worse.

Standard Ruby makes it sane.

This week has been very busy and stressful. It wouldn’t be so bad if the majority of this stress wasn’t self-inflicted, but it absolutely was. The Other Place is almost ready, but now we’re being ghosted by the cleaners we had set up and ready to go. Excellent.

One of my jobs this week was to setup the new Lenovo tiny PC to act as my UniFi controller.

Because I was doing all this “on the move” I didn’t have a monitor to plug-in to the new PC for the initial Ubuntu install (it will run headless afterwards). Then I remembered my experiment with Orion, which allows, with the addition of a HDMI capture dongle, to plug any old PC into an iPad. I have an iPad ✅ I have a HDMI capture dongle ✅ This time, it worked really well. Very handy.

The Ubuntu Server install was straightforward. I was pleasantly surprised to see a section in the install wizard where it asks for your GitHub username so it can download your public key and configure SSH automatically.

The VESA mount I bought also worked really well.

Setting up the software was easy too. The first thing I did was setup Tailscale using their supplied installation script. This was stupidly easy to do. In retrospect I should have setup Tailscale inside Docker like I have in the past just so everything was in one place, but alas I forgot. Once I had Tailscale installed I knew I could perform the rest of the configuration anywhere I happened to be.

For the UniFi controller, I already had the Docker config from my old server so this was a case of installing Docker, and setting up that with some slight tweaks. Once the software was running in Docker I took a backup from the old controller and restored it in the new. Everything clicked into place with the exception that my devices didn’t automatically adopt because I had a hardcoded IP for the “Inform URL” setup in the web UI. Once I changed that value everything worked.

I am loathe to call this a success for fear of future failure, but it sure looks like one so far.

Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h

It felt like extortion. Pay us $120k until tomorrow or we destroy your business.

I’ve always found the idea of handing over my DNS records to Cloudflare scary. How would you use Cloudflare whilst mitigating their ability to extort you?

This week it finally happened. I knocked half an Oat Mocha over my computer 😢 A public breakdown then followed. The good news is that is still seems to work normally. The bad news is that it smells of coffee and some of the keys are becoming sticky, so we will see how it goes.